Appendix 2 - ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ by Henry Austen

Summary

Dated 13 December 1817, with a postscript of 20 December 1817, the ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ was published at the beginning of the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion issued by John Murray in late 1817, with 1818 on the title page. Revised, enlarged and renamed ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’, dated ‘October 5. 1832’, it appeared in the 1833 ‘Standard Novels’ series by Richard Bentley as number 23 with Sense and Sensibility. It continued to be reprinted with Sense and Sensibility until superseded by the fuller A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh, the son of Jane's eldest brother James, commissioned to coincide with Bentley's new edition of Austen's novels published in December 1869 (title page 1870).

For a description of the changes between the 1818 ‘Biographical Notice’ and the 1833 ‘Memoir’ see the Introduction, pp. lix–lx. Jane Austen is simply called ‘the Author’ on the title page of the ‘Biographical Notice’; however its first sentence begins ‘Jane Austen’. Henry Austen's text is the only authority for the letter ‘written a few weeks before her death’. The ‘letter to my dearest E’ is to James Edward Austen (later Austen-Leigh), 16–17 December 1816 in Letters pp. 322–4.

HENRY AUSTEN, ‘BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF THE AUTHOR’ (1818)

The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public. And when the public, which has not been insensible to the merits of ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Mansfield Park,’ and ‘Emma,’ shall be informed that the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave, perhaps a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than simple curiosity.

Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event. To those who lament their irreparable loss, it is consolatory to think that, as she never deserved disapprobation, so, in the circle of her family and friends, she never met reproof; that her wishes were not only reasonable, but gratified; and that to the little disappointments incidental to human life was never added, even for a moment, an abatement of good-will from any who knew her.